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Given the interest in our recent post about the fbFund in which we looked at the first two classes of the fbFund and evaluated their progress to-date, (Analyzing Facebook’s fbFund Winners: A Mostly Quantitative Look) we wanted to go back and address one of the main questions that came up around evaluating platform apps. Dave McClure of the Founders Fund and several others commented that high-usage apps for which monthly active users (MAU) is a good evaluation metric are different than platform apps. With this in mind, we split all of the apps that the fbFund is backing including the most recent class announced in late May into two groups: high usage and platform.
As the name implies, platform apps are those which enable developers and others to build and develop various programs using their platform. These apps are offering platforms or building blocks in some sense. Out of the 56 fbFund apps, 8 of them (14%) appear to be platform apps. These apps include: Daikon, Social Arcade, J2Play, Gameyola, Samasource, Wildfire, Kontangent, and Hotberry.
Descriptions of the 8 platform apps are given below:
| Daikon | Daikon enables users to build powerful applications on the Facebook platform without writing a single line of code. |
| Social Arcade | Social Arcade enables users to get creative and design their own game from shoot-’em-ups to platformers to racing games and more. |
| j2play | A social gaming platform that enables developers to build pc, mobile, and web games. |
| Gameyola | Gameyola is a distribution and monetization platform for casual Flash games. Flash games currently monetize poorly, but Gameyola solves this problem by platoform Flash developers with tools to sell virtual goods and to acquire users through social channels |
| Samasource | Samasource finds and trains reliable QA professionals to test Facebook apps with a user-friendly interface that lives on Facebook Platform. Samasource enables developers lower costs, reduce poverty, and improve their applications. |
| Wildfire | Wildfire enables consumers to discover, share and engage with interactive promotions like contests, sweepstakes and give-aways and enables companies to easily create their own attractive, branded promotions that are automatically integrated with Facebook’s social features. |
| Kontangent | Kontagent is the leading viral analytics platform for social network application developers. Kontagent analytics enables developers to view deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service. |
| HotBerry | Frameworks and mechanics enables users to generate own casual games on Facebook |
Success for these apps is a function of whether they are achieving traction as measured by whether they are enabling the types of activities they were built for. Rather than comparing monthly active users, comparing the number of applications developed on these platform month over month provides a proxy for their performance. Since they are enabling the building of different things, comparing the percentage growth in the number of applications developed is one way to compare platform apps against one another and so serves as a proxy for their adoption and relative success. Like monthly active users which is the metric for high usage apps, the measure is not perfect but in lieu of the ‘perfect’ metric, this serves us well in trying to measure relative performance of platform apps.
For several of the platform apps, we’re able to gather the number of new applications developed on their platform and as a result, it will be relatively easy to track development and growth. However, for many of these platform applications, this information was not readily available. We are hoping in the coming weeks to retrieve this data and begin tracking progress against all these fbFund platform apps. To date, we have been successful in finding information for 4 of the 8 platform apps as detailed below.
| Social Arcade |
As of June |
|
Number of Applications Developed by users |
340 |
| j2play | |
|
Number of games developed |
66 |
| Gameyola | |
|
Number of games developed |
3204 |
| Samasource | |
|
Number of Projects Completed |
311 |
We’ve indicated our starting data points above and will track these measures over time to compare the growth rates of these platform apps. If you have ideas or sources of information that we can use to track the other platform apps not named, do let us know. More importantly, let us know your comments with reference to the method we’ve outlined to measure platform app success. In lieu of more detailed information, will the growth rate and absolute number of actions ‘enabled’ by these platforms serve as a good proxy for measuring the relative success of these apps?
For more information about the fbFund and to view its overall portfolio, you can click on the investor widget below. To learn more about these specific apps, you can also click on their company widgets below as well.
We look forward to your insights and ideas.
